Exchange Online

Microsoft plans to deliver new migration tools to move Google G Suite email, contact, and calendar data to Office 365 (which means Exchage Online) by Q2 2019. The new tools are likely to move from the existing implementation built around the antique IMAP4 protocol, which only covers email and is prone to throttling by Google.

Microsoft has made privileged access management (PAM) generally available for Office 365, but in reality it's only Exchange Online that supports the new feature. This isn't surprising because Exchange has a well-developed role-based access control system that the PAM developers can leverage, but it does pose a question about how they'll extend PAM to other Office 365 workloads.

Teams borrows from many other Office 365 applications to build its functionality.The latest component taken is Exchange Online address book policies, used to segment the directory and stop users getting in touch with other people in the organization outside the scope of a policy. But it's an imperfect and partial block, and if you really want to stop people talking, you'll have to do a lot more work.

Microsoft has released a new version of Outlook Web Access (OWA) to preview. Office 365 targeted release tenants can check the new UI out to see how it works. It's new and it's early, so some glitches exist, but the new OWA is more attractive than the old, which might be all that's important.

Microsoft has scheduled 1,500+ sessions for the Ignite 2018 conference in Orlando next week. What's happening for Office 365? Well, there are many sessions to attend, but the interesting thing is the huge number of sessions assigned to Teams compared to other workloads. SharePoint does OK, but Exchange is low, and Yammer gets a surprising allocation.

A recent survey revealed that 22% of executives in small to medium businesses continue to share email passwords. There's no way this should happen inside Office 365 because many techniques exist to support more secure collaboration. Take your pick from mailbox delegation, shared mailboxes, Office 365 Groups, and Teams

Office 365 Administrators have many ways to access user data. It's important to set up a policy to control and then verify that access. If you don't, your administrators might be looking into Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint, and OneDrive without oversight. And that would be a bad thing.

Scammers and spammers love having large databases of email addresses to use for their nefarious purposes. Your Exchange Online addresses might be in those databases, so here's how to check the email addresses for your mailboxes against the Have I been pwned service (HIBP) using some PowerShell.

The news that Microsoft will make mailbox auditing the default in Exchange Online is very welcome, as is the new mechanism they plan to use. Microsoft won't get the new feature rolled out across Office 365 until the end of 2018, so there's still a gap to fill to make sure that audit records are gathered for mailbox activity.

Microsoft made a mistake in their provisioning process for Exchange Online shared mailboxes, so lots of mailboxes have 100 GB quotas. Things are changing now and new shared mailboxes will have 50 GB quotas, unless you license them. Here's how to check the status of your shared mailboxes.

Microsoft has updated the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) to transfer some Exchange on-premises configuration settings. That's nice, but possibly too little and too late to make any real difference. Office 365 has moved on, most people who wanted to configure hybrid connections are now in the cloud, and the settings aren't all that exciting.

I don't consider backups to be a necessity for Office 365, but ISVs continue to offer these products and customers continue to buy, so I chatted with Spanning to find out what's happening in the Office 365 market, who's using cloud backups, and why. We also spoke about the challenges that backup vendors continue to have in coping with some of the unique aspects of Office 365.

GDPR Article 17 allows individuals to request an organization to erase their personal data. Now that GDPR is in effect, what are the practical steps to take to process an erasure request against Office 365 data? As it turns out, the answer is not straightforward.

Outlook.com (premium) now boasts two new protected email features taken directly from Exchange Online. It's an example of how the shared Office 365 infrastructure enables Microsoft to make functionality available to users of its consumer and enterprise platforms as they want. OneDrive Restore is another example. In both cases, the features aren't available to free seats.

The venerable Exchange Get-MailboxStatistics has been around for over ten years, but now it's telling lies about Office 365 users. Well, just the last login date to their mailbox. The problem is that the world is a very different place to when Microsoft first introduced PowerShell in Exchange 2007. Mailboxes didn't get so many visits from mailbox assistants then...